At least in hip hop, things make more sense. Sex, danger, and girth
reach an apotheosis in a world that doesn't need an Elvis to get across.
Biggie Smalls
and Big Pun, even the overweight lover
Heavy D, confronted
power (and ladies) on their own terms and presented themselves
unapologetically as large indeed. When he asked "Who Shot Ya?"
the Notorious B.I.G. didn't bother to wear
the girdle of social responsibility and reasonableness that Springsteen
does.

Is the hardest-workingest aspect of the Boss a substitute for sex?
James Brown made sex a machine and worked it out on stage; Barry White
simply was sex. His music demanded panty-shedding just like Tom
Jones's. Who said it was going to be pretty? The Boss and Meat Loaf are the
pale, not-funky version of the same split. If Springsteen can be the heroic
Errol Flynn in this Edge of Darkness Town, why can't Meat Loaf be
the Alan Hale  a character-actor cop with just enough countercultural glitz
to provide a humanizing mirror and still seem errant, even roguish? Maybe
because Springsteen's too self-aware to pass for a vapid skinny rocker and
too Dylanesque to go the fat man route in middle-age. That's why he
positions himself between Big Man Clarence Clemons and skinny weirdo Little
Steven Van Zandt every night. The pudgy ghost of Roy Orbison may hover over
them all, but it never lands in Springsteen's body to stay.

Nattering chatterbox Timothy Noah, who
claims
"American Skin" is a crypto-endorsement for
Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign, is farther off then even his detractors
suppose. When Springsteen introduced his sax player at Madison Square
Garden by asking the audience to "forget that joker from Long Island,
[here's] the next Senator of the State of New York  Big Man Clarence
Clemons," he was nominating rock 'n' roll, the fat rock 'n' roll that
stretches back from Clemons to King Curtis, for portly Daniel Patrick
Moynihan's Senate seat. The Boss has
repeatedly rejected offers to grace the Clinton White House, where a
sax-blowin' president, like his Southern soulmate Elvis, wants to be Big
Joe Turner, too. The McDonald's hamburgers finally make sense: Bill Clinton,
friend to ATF agent and state trooper alike,
is preparing for his hunka hunka years just like Elvis was. He should've
had Meat Loaf over. Could anyone possibly wonder whether Bill Clinton knows
all the words to "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad"? And does that
famous shot with the sax
remind you of a
certain character
in a charmingly dated
cult movie featuring Susan Sarandon? The off-duty cops and their kin
currently
turning their backs and giving Bruce the finger
as he performs "American Skin" don't get it. They tell reporters they just want
Springsteen to look at things from their point-of-view, but he's been doing
that for years. Springsteen's proven he can bring a cop's inner torment to
life. It's the outer torment, the utility-belt-stretching girth the men in
blue must contend with night after night, that the man from Freehold can't grasp.

As much as Springsteen tries to let his inner fat man out, he's still
a 50-year-old guy who's in great shape. He's makes his living playing rock
'n' roll, and now he's inadvertently reminded a group of people who loved
him that their lives are horribly complicated and compromised. It's classic
embarrassment-anger, with an unsightly bulge of group persecution
complex. When the musician you loved more than any other
reminds you that you've ended up a murderer, you either face it or resent
him. And, if you're the head of the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent
Association, you call him a fag.

When the fat is repressed it returns in ugly ways. The cops' war on
Springsteen is not so far from the original shooting of Diallo, who may
have been doomed as much by his ropey, artful-dodger physique as by his
skin color. When was the last time you saw the cops shoot a man
who looked like Godfrey Cambridge?

By calling
Springsteen a floating fag, the fat take their revenge on the skinny in a
way no one could've predicted. Meat Loaf never would have let this happen,
and in his honor, in all future discussion of "American Skin,"
let's replace the words "department" and "force" with the word
"loaf" whenever they show up in the vicinity of the word "police."
(Example: The police arrived in full loaf.) Meat Loaf has always
been a better rock star, anyway. He didn't get this much press during his
New York run at the Beacon Theater last winter, and he deserved it. What do
you have to do in that town to prove yourself? Too bad we can't ask Amadou
Diallo.